Chamber pleased with results of 2022 legislative session

The 2022 Regular Session of the Oklahoma Legislature has officially ended, and officials with the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber indicated state lawmakers did an outstanding job looking out for the business community.

Going into the session, the Chamber was concerned about several issues that could have negatively impacted economic development. One of the most important priorities for the Chamber was to protect critical economic development incentive programs from being repealed or scaled-back. During the previous two years, there was an effort to repeal the five-year ad valorem exemption for new or expanding manufacturing facilities, as well as an attempt to make it more difficult to qualify projects in the state’s metro areas for the Quality Jobs Act – an important program the Chamber uses to recruit new companies to locate in the OKC area.

“We support efforts to expand economic development in rural parts of the state and worked with legislative leadership and Governor Stitt to help them understand the best way to accomplish that is not to make it more difficult in the state’s metro areas, but to enact legislation to spur development in the rural areas. And that’s what they did,” said Mark VanLandingham, the Chamber’s senior vice president of government relations and policy.

The Chamber supported House Bill 4464 which appropriated $250 million to the Progressing Rural Economic Prosperity Fund, or PREP, which was created under HB 4456. The appropriation was designated to develop/upgrade industrial parks throughout rural Oklahoma to attract large-scale investment.

Another major piece of legislation supported by the Chamber, even though it was not related to a specific project in the Oklahoma City area, was HB 4455, more commonly known as the “mega-projects” bill. This measure provided a new $700 million state incentive, on top of other state and local incentives, to help lure a major battery manufacturer, believed to be Panasonic, to Pryor, Okla. If the company chooses to locate to Oklahoma, it will have a multibillion-dollar impact in the state and create 4,000 to 6,000 new jobs.

“Economic development in every part of the state is important. We’ve had our fair share over the last 10 to 15 years,” VanLandingham said. “Although OKC does not have any projects in our current recruiting pipeline meeting the criteria for the “mega-projects” incentive, we likely will sometime in the future. Getting that incentive on the books to enable OKC to be more competitive for major economic development projects overall is a plus.”

VanLandingham said heading into the session, there was extensive discussion about vaccine legislation as the COVID-19 virus continued to pose a substantial health threat to the public. There was widespread opposition in much of Oklahoma to the federal government’s mandate that companies with more than 100 employees must require their employees to get vaccinated, tested weekly or face substantial fines. This resulted in more than 50 vaccination bills at the start of session, many of which would have interfered with a company’s right to determine/implement its own vaccine policy. However, through the Chamber’s advocacy and the efforts of others, none of those bills advanced.

“The Chamber made it a priority to protect the right of employers to determine and implement their own vaccination policies. And, at the end of session, not one bad vaccine bill was enacted into law,” VanLandingham said. “We are extremely appreciative of what the Legislature did to manage all those vaccination bills.”

Oklahoma’s economy has seemingly been humming right along in recent years, despite the challenges and obstacles presented by the pandemic. Oklahoma City has fared better than most large cities across the U.S., but that does not necessarily mean all is well. Workforce needs still exist as did prior to the pandemic. Shortages in critical in-demand fields, such as teaching and engineering, continue to plague the state. And now a shortage of nurses, due in part to the pandemic, has expanded the list of in-demand degrees needs even further.

To help address those concerns, the Chamber supported increased funding to expand the number of teachers, nurses and engineers in the state. When the final budget was enacted, K-12, CareerTech and higher education all saw funding increases averaging almost 5%, with higher education receiving the largest increase of 7.45% to $873 million. To address the teacher shortage, the legislation was enacted to fund scholarships for students as they are pursuing a teaching degree and then afterward when they are in the classroom.

In addition to teacher scholarships, the Legislature also approved additional funding for colleges and universities through the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) to help expand nursing programs. Lawmakers also provided additional funding targeted to produce more engineers and other STEM-related graduates.

“This isn’t a problem unique to Oklahoma. There are significant workforce shortages of teachers, nurses and engineers in most other states,” VanLandingham remarked. “We understand Tinker could hire 1,000 engineers right now if they were available. What we have is not necessarily a shortage of college graduates, but a shortage of graduates and other workers with the degrees and skill sets that are in demand to grow the economy to its highest potential.”

It was another successful year protecting the rights of business owners and event hosts to prohibit firearms if they choose to do so, VanLandingham said. Out of the more than 50 gun-rights expansion bills introduced during the session, two were of major concern – legislation to allow firearms on college campuses, and into the Oklahoma State Fair and Tulsa State Fair. Those bills were stopped, however, and the session ended successfully without passage of any harmful gun legislation.

“The Second Amendment needs to be balanced with the property rights of business owners and event hosts. We support allowing companies and event hosts (concerts, sporting events, horse shows) to determine their own policies on whether to allow firearms,” VanLandingham said.

Other Chamber successes for the 2022 legislative session included working with the City of Oklahoma City and other entities, along with state lawmakers and executive branch personnel, to navigate the state’s ARPA process in pursuit of several multimillion-dollar funding requests in central Oklahoma, including water-line relocation at Tinker AFB, additional infrastructure at the State Fairgrounds and infrastructure to assist in recruiting new businesses to the OKC area.

Fully funding the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s eight-year plan and the Heartland Flyer passenger rail service were also among the Chamber’s efforts this session. Senate Bill 1488 by Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-Broken Arrow) would have eliminated $2.85 million from the state’s passenger rail revolving fund, thereby ending the Heartland Flyer’s daily service to Dallas-Ft. Worth. With SB 1488 defeated, stakeholders, including the Chamber, will continue to pursue funds to extend Amtrak service north to Newton, Kan., using funds from the federal infrastructure bill to expand passenger rail. This extension would link OKC with Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago and other points across the country. The Chamber is working with other Oklahoma chambers from the Texas border to the Kansas border along the Heartland Flyer Route, as well as the U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak, in support of this effort.

Additional successes during the 2022 session included uniting with Chamber members to oppose legislation regarding Pharmacy Benefit Managers, stopping data privacy legislation and supporting legislation to improve student mental health statewide.

For additional details on these and other legislative efforts, please visit the latest issue of the Chamber publication “The Business Advocate” at okcbusinessadvocate.com.

This story originally appeared in the June 2022 edition of the VeloCity newsletter.